Let me pick my jaw up from the floor so I can post about this...

My little girl actually asked for a nap for the first time ever today.  Sure, it was all non-verbal communication - toddling into the bedroom, vocally complaining that I wasn't in there, coming to the living room to find me, holding her arms up with an emphatic "dah!" to ask to be picked up, pointing to the bedroom from the vantage point of my arms, pointing to the bed, and then when put down, signing milk and rubbing her eyes.  However, coming from a baby who I generally have to fight with to get to nap, the above sequence (so deliberately enacted) is nothing short of remarkable.  I momentarily thought I'd wandered into some weird alternate universe, but no; just my baby, slowly growing up day by day.

Win some, lose some..

It is still very, very busy in our household, and hence still very, very quiet in my blog realm.  I'm starting to make some "back to school" type modifications (not that anyone in our house is back to school, but as fall sets in , a greater sense of order and stability seems to go along with it, which I associate with "school time").  One of these changes is getting dinner on the table by 6:30 instead of 7, and then LW in bed by 8:30 instead of 9+.  I'm hoping to push bedtime back even earlier once daylight savings rolls around, but for now we'll take what we can get :)

Anyway, I don't have time (surprise, surprise - but I promise I will again someday!  Blogging is about fifth on my to-do-list each day and I just never quite get there) for a long post.  But I thought I'd share a couple of this week's wins and also losses:

First, in the category of losses, fails, or "things I hate":

1)  The lawnmower starting up outside and prematurely waking LW from a nap.  It happens at least once a week, I have no control over it, and it makes me want to kick something.
2)  Hot sticky weather that makes it almost impossible to get LW to nap in the first place, and shortens her already short span of patience.  I'm convinced that being overheated is contributing to her new found problem behaviors of scratching and biting (me, and also herself... poor little girl has started biting her *own* fingers when she gets frustrated.  It is kind of heartbreaking to see)
3) The grand finale of "fails" for the week, and of things I hate, or that make me want to kick something:  last night I went into our bedroom to a t-shirt after putting LW down for bed.  I obviously didn't want to turn on the light, so I wandered around in the pitch black.  I went to bend to reach the bottom shelf of my bureau.. unfortunately not realizing that I'd left the second to top drawer open, which I hit, full force, with my mouth.  BAM instant punctured, fat lip.  Today I am sporting the "tattooed lipstick/collagen implant" look, very naturally.
4)  A bonus fail for the week - I was working on making a plaid skirt for the fall, perfectly matched the plaids only to not take into account that the pattern, which had multiple seams, was going to make weird chevrons in obvious and unintentional places.  I'm not very happy with the result.

However, the week hasn't been a total loss:

1)  I managed to complete a guest post that I needed to submit by Sept 1st, and was even happy with it.
2)  I've been putting my crockpot to good use, to try to have less hassle at dinnertime, which has mostly been a success.  I need to find better recipes, but it is definitely easier to fix things early in the day and then just eat dinner, rather than cooking for an hour, then eating, then all the cleanup.
3)  We have actually managed to have dinner at the desired time all week, which has left time for an after dinner walk (instituted as a habit last week, when my cousin was visiting, and a tradition that we'll hopefully keep up until the weather gets prohibitively cold; LW gets all excited as soon as we ask her if she wants to go for a walk).
4)  Bonus win for the week: managing to find the time to sit down and write this post.  Yay for finally knocking off that fifth thing on the to-do-list!

Crock-pot recipes, anyone?  Or advice on how to soothe frustrated toddlers?

Perspectives, Harvest Bounty, and When Food Goes Bad...

My apologies if my title ends up being a bit misleading.  You see, I had the very best of intentions of sitting down to write a lovely, informative post today, all about how a change in perspective can turn what seems like a problem into a real blessing.  I was going to start with a quote from Return of the Jedi,

"Luke, you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi

I was then going to turn our thoughts back to early spring, when a mislabeling error prior to planting resulted in the grave imbalance (as anyone who has ever raised even one cherry tomato bush would recognize) of five cherry tomato bushes to three regular tomato bushes.  How, in the present moment of late August, the cherry tomatoes are threatening to drown us in their unbelievable abundance of red, yellow, and purple fruits.  How I've slowly been resigning myself to just letting them rot on the vine, having exhausted most ways of disposing of the bounty via recipes or charity, and how all of this changed with the serendipitious discovery of a recipe for oven-dried cherry tomatoes.  I had glorious plans to display a few choice pictures of the harvest, process, and result:

(for reference - these two bowls are only half of what I picked yesterday)

(Here's the other half)

(And the finished product)

I could be writing right now about how the tasty "tomato raisins," as someone described them, had turned my thoughts on tomato bounty from "ugh" to "hurray!"  I was even planning to make some lovely resolutions about finding uses for all the odd bounties of my garden, as well as for using my crock pot more this fall (having, as a side note, really enjoyed how much easier it is to dry things than to can them, and having reflected that the crock pot would likely make dinner preparation similarly easier).

So what's the problem, you might ask?  And why aren't you reading a post that looks like that, rather than a lament for the post that could have been?

Well - the problem is Google.  Google, and the fact that your food is trying to kill you.

It started when I, innocently, was trying to determine the best oven temperature, and how I could store the beautiful (and yummy - oh so yummy) finished product.

Some two hours later, and pages upon pages of info about Botulism! Salmonella! Listeria! and lots of other bacteria that I don't even want to think about, I began to realize a few things.

1)  It's all well and good to want to preserve food at home, to try and eliminate some of the more nasty "preservatives" present in store bought food.  There's just one catch, though - those preservatives happen to be there because your food is trying to kill you.
2)  Very well, you might say, I'll just cook my food very well after it is preserved!  Then it will be so yummy and healthy for me!  Right?  No.  Because in order to kill the food before it kills you, you have to boil it for so long, or cook it at such a high temperature, that it no longer has any nutritional content whatsover.  And yummy taste at that point is right out.
3)  And if you try to get the food by choosing to eat only raw items, the food will still win because of the pesticides.
4)  Even if you go organic to avoid the pesticides, the food is one step ahead, because the pesticides were there for a reason, to save you from all the nasty bugs (visible and invisible) that would otherwise be there, again as part of the plot for your life.
5)  You can try to freeze the food to preserve it, which works great, but it becomes dangerous as soon as it begins to thaw.  Alternately, you can cook it to high temperatures, but again it becomes deadly as it cools.  Perhaps we could eat everything either stick-to-your-tongue frozen or scald-your-mouth hot...

Of course, the real conclusion is, it's pretty dangerous for anyone with just a little medical knowledge, a hypochondriac streak, and a wildly active imagination to spend very much time on Google.

I will say that my little oven-dried tomatoes really do taste great.  They may end up killing me, but I bet they'll be good on pizza...

In all seriousness, for those who are wondering, just drying tomatoes isn't a problem, although sources do differ on how high or or low the oven temp must be.  The problem that had me searching for hours was whether having greased my baking sheet with olive oil, and sprinkled everything with garlic powder might have created a potential botulism-growing environment.  I'll store them in the freezer, and then use on pizzas or in sauce, so my logical reasoning says it will probably be ok, but in the meantime I really did learn just enough about food safety to pretty much never want to eat again. 

So maybe it really is all about perspectives: choosing a perspective that accepts the inevitable margin of risk, rather than striving for a perfect black and white of safety; balancing potential consequences with likely outcome, and holding fast with one hand to science, the other to faith.

Slowing down..

It's been a very busy couple of weeks: dress making, cake making, wedding festivities, and then a full week off for both my husband and I, which meant coming up with some fun things to do to make our vacation "count".  Towards the end of the week, my daughter came down with Coxsackie virus (if you've never heard of it, don't worry - I hadn't, either), so she was a miserable camper for a few days, and we ended up having to postpone our planned trip to the ocean.  Now I've got the same miserable sore throat that she had, and am finally listening to my body's cues to just slow down a little.  Hence the renewed quiet on the blogging front (I know, I've spent most of the summer apologizing for being quiet!)

The end of the summer always brings a particular frenzy of activity: that first burst of fall color in the trees sparks a sense of urgency, as I try to squeeze in every last one those activities planned back when summer was just an oasis glimpsed distantly through winter-sick eyes.  Complicating and adding to that last burst of planned fun, I always seem to experience a huge creativity surge as the weather gets cooler.  If you've ever played Sims2, they hit the nail on the head - the characters are more motivated to learn and do crafty things in the fall.  Not that I've had any time for such games since the stork dropped off LW, but the analogy comes back to me at times like these, just the same.

Anyway, I've got skirt patterns, patterns for LW, plans to make more throw pillows, and stacks of books that I'm gathering to read; plans to pick apples and put away crisps and butter like last year; harvesting, preserving, and also have some other ideas and projects that have been waiting for cooler weather and more indoor time.  I'm reflecting more on faith, on vocation, on who I am and who God is calling me to be.  I suppose it's always this way at the change of a season (which makes me wonder, what is it like in those parts of the world with no, or different, seasons?) - the space between seasons is a transition time, a "time-between-times" as in Celtic mythology, and as such, is a perfect time for reflecting, taking stock, and also for making plans for the future.  However, this end-of-summer cold is reminding me not to burn myself out in a frenzy of "enjoyment," but rather, to take some time just to be; to go on walks, or maybe just lay in bed and listen to the breeze (if I can get LW to occupy herself, somehow!)  In short, to enjoy the "now" of the end of summer.

So, what about all of you?  Do you experience an end-of-summer frenzy, or a burst of creative energy at the beginning of Fall?  Or how do you stay in the moment, in the midst of the always-moving busyness of life?

Final cake pics!

Courtesy of my friend Meredith, photographer extraordinaire (and, incidentally, whose car we borrowed!)

Cake in transit:

Loading into the car (also a much nicer shot of "the dress" than the ones I posted previously)

Good friend Dan lending his muscle to escort the cake safely to the reception tent:

The finished result!

The finished product (picture one)

It's a rather far off/blurry shot (and includes the happy bride and groom), but here is "the cake" at the reception:

I'll post a better picture if I get one :)

(PS - no, that is not my husband - he really does have an identical twin).

The Making of a Cake

Day one:  2:00 pm start time.

(~ 85 degrees and humid)

Materials (actually 3 boxes more than this, plus three dozen eggs and three lbs of butter)

The first layer of the day: disaster!  Panic ensues, as I had no backup plan in the case of an epic fail.

A closeup of the extent of the horror... I seriously thought about still using the layer, then realized that there was no way it would hold up the weight of the upper tier..

First successful layer, after leveling (at which point, my panic began to die down; I cooled subsequent layers far more thoroughly, and pounded the heck out of my pans before tipping them out):

Truth-in-blogging disclosure: here is what my kitchen really looked like (look for the avocado on the table - that was LW's dinner, after my cake making assistant had left for a meeting, and my husband was off to the bachelor party):

My dinner on the run:

And my other kitchen surface (banana = LW's other dinner item; note that our kitchen is quite small for this sort of project)

Here's where I finally felt like it was going to come together.  Three layers completed and leveled; a fourth was cooling on the stove, and layers five and six were in the oven (sushi and cake: that's all I ate all day):

Baking nicely...

I took a midway point break to clean up; this was around 9:30 pm, after putting LW to bed:

(This is what my kitchen more usually looks like, minus the remaining cake making tools)

A shot of the floor before I cleaned it up:

What you can't see in the above picture is the *crumbs*...

The mess re-emerged when I switched to stacking, filling, and inserting the supporting columns.

Finally, all three tiers were leveled, filled, supporting columns were in, and ready for stage two the next day.  Day one end time (with cleanup): 11:30 pm.

Day two:  9 am start time

(~75, cool, windy, comfortable and thankfully not humid)

Crumb coating the layers (a light layer of icing to "seal" the crumbs onto the cake, then back in the fridge to crust before the thicker, "real" layer of frosting went on):

All tiers crumb coated (note: my fridge also is not really big enough to accommodate this type of project, along with our regular foodstuff):

Frosted the cake (neglected to take a picture at this point - it became clear that time was going to be of the essence), and then practiced a pattern for the sugar pearl border:

My good friend and cake-making assistant, moral support, and general girl-Friday - Beth - putting sugar pearls on the cake (I did most of the rows, but towards the end we put the pedal to the medal and started working in double-time - it took about four hours of individually placing the sugar pearls with tweezers to do all the borders):

 

The completed cake, minus the ribbon and topper: this was our pre-transportation shot.  We popped it back in the fridge for about 15 minutes while I got dressed for the rehearsal (to which we were about 45 minutes late :P), then loaded it in the car and took off (the top was not actually crooked - just the angle was a little weird).

At the rehearsal, we applied the ribbon, which immediately soaked up grease despite the completely crusted icing.  However, this is basically what the cake would look like the next day (Beth modeling the cake topper, just for picture taking purposes:

Day two end time ~ 5:15 pm for frosting/bordering, plus an additional 15 minutes or so to apply the ribbon, an unsuccessful late evening trip to the craft store for replacement ribbon (they were all out of that particular color and texture), followed by late-night Googling for ribbon solutions (real end time: 11:30 pm).

Day three: immediately after the wedding Mass, we quickly took the ribbon off the cake, applied shortening to the backside of the ribbon to make it *evenly* grease saturated (which darkened it slightly but was otherwise unnoticeable: thanks Google!), and reapplied.  Loaded the cake into the car again, after which Beth and another friend took it off to the reception.  There they added an inspired touch of rose petals scattered around the base, and officially put on the flower topper.

I didn't make it to the reception until about an hour later, due to needing to pick my daughter up on the other side of town, etc, and thus didn't get a picture of the finished product.  However, I'll post it as soon as I get one from one of the various other people at the event.

Anyway, I received many compliments, everyone seemed to like the taste as well, and no-one died after eating it, so I call the whole affair a success. Oh yes, and my brother-in-law and new sister-in-law were very happy - with the cake, but much more with the celebration of their marriage, which was, after all, the important thing about the day :)